Before Privacy laws spoiled all the fun, a great ritual was played out on a walls of the Chifley library at the ANU in the first week of December.
Half a dozen minions of the university administration would walk across the library lawn carried large boards with lists of everyone’s exam results.
Names, subjects, successes and failures were there for all the world to see. Students milled around and surged to the boards. Squeals, moans (made more poignant if failure meant no more study deferral for national service) muttered commiserations and hearty congratulations flowed. We then adjourned to the Union Bar with occasional returns to the results board when an absent friend was remembered.
And there were many absent friends who returned to homes out of Canberra to bludge on parents or for holiday jobs.
The absent friends, though, were catered for by The Canberra Times which in those days published the whole list, all keyed in by linotype operators with lead output checked against original paper.
Incidentally, that is the true meaning of proof-reading — where one person reads what has been re-keyed against an original version. It is not to be confused with editing (called sub-editing in newspaper not to confuse the role with the editor’s more general task). With editing there is only one original version which the editor changes, correcting grammar, spelling, sense etc.
No newspaper has proof-readers any more. We still have sub-editors.
Anyway, absent friends could get their results by ordering their copy of The Canberra Times that day from any newsagent in Australia. Circulation went up.
Privacy worries killed that off. A few lily-livered students couldn’t bear their failures to be publicised so the university only published student numbers. The numbers were not a circulation winner. We stopped publishing.
Now there is another threat to the publication of huge amounts of detail in newspapers. This week we published the full Australia Day Honours list. Earlier this month we published six pages of university entrance details. We usually publish screeds of Canberra Show results. In the past we have published huge amounts of sports draws and results.
Enter the internet.
The university places are already on the internet. Next year the honours list will most likely go on from an Australian Government site. It is likely to go on this year, subject to a technical hitch, on The Canberra Times site tomorrow. A lot of local sporting organisations have their own internet site, or the organisers have group e-mail lists to send draws, information and results. In my squash competition (where sheep stations are regularly at stake) 90 per cent of the people are on e-mail.
It means the demand for paper versions will fall to the extent that they may not be worth publishing in paper version.
This will not be such a bad thing. The newsprint can be used for better things. Big lists are rarely read from end to end. People usually scan quickly for a name or thing and then read the detail with that name of thing and then skip to the next. Electronic publication is better for that sort of thing. You know what you are after and you hone in on it. That is how people use the internet. Browser software is a misnomer.
The other thing they do is set up search engines to find new information on their special interests as it appears. It is a narrowing
The strength of a newspaper will continue to be in revealing new information, especially material which others do not want published, the summarising and analysing of material that readers do not have the time to look at first hand (particularly reports and court and parliamentary proceedings), the selection and presentation of a cross-section of the day’s events across all fields of human endeavour.
The latter diversifies taste, it does not narrow it like the internet searchers. With a newspaper, scientist readers look at summarised developments in the law and politics; lawyers look at science; mathematicians look at politics and architecture. Each relies on selections made by journalists.
You can take your pick whether you want it on screen or on paper. The vast majority want it on paper and may always want it that way no matter how fast search engines and internet access get. The only question will be whether enough advertisers continue to think paper communication is worthwhile so that the revenue is there to support the journalism.
On that score, some newspaper costs are likely to go down, not up, with use of the very information technology that appears to threaten them.
The honours list is a case in point. Twenty years ago it would have taken at least 30 man-hours to get it to press. Ten years ago it was about eight, this year it was four. Next year it will be less than three.
Smarter and quicker electronic picture taking, image manipulation, information retrieval, layout programs and more efficient presses will help the paper product even if the big list becomes a thing of the past.